The Health and Environment Cluster is an inter-disciplinary platform that engages staff members and PhD candidates across different groups and departments at Wageningen University & Research. We share our research on the relationship between health and the physical environment through collaboration and joint activities to facilitate interdisciplinary debate.
Vision and Scope
Our vision is to be a go to place for research on health and environment at WUR. We believe that the physical environment can contribute in a direct and sustainable way to improving health and quality of life.
Our mission is to understand how health is best supported by and through different physical settings, for different groups, and at different stages of the life course. The challenge is to understand the intricate ways in which health interacts with places, spaces and ecologies. Part of that challenge is to explore what forms of knowledge are privileged and which forms can be produced, by whom and how. Moreover, we examine the ways in which different types of knowledge mutually inform society, policymakers and scientists in ways that can empower and be of practical use in supporting the health of different social groups.
The cluster brings together researchers with a variety of social and environmental science backgrounds with a broad range of interests, including greening and health, healthy cities, healthy architecture, place-making practices, environmental justice, climate change and health, therapeutic landscapes, green care, community gardening, soundscapes and health, and more.
Activities
The cluster engages in different activities including discussions of readings, sharing of research or papers in progress, seminars with external speakers, field visits, and so on.
Contact
Contact us for further information or if you want to join the cluster: Marthe Derkzen (HSO, marthe.derkzen@wur.nl) and Agnès Patuano (LSP, agnes.patuano@wur.nl)
Members
Edward H. Huijbens (b. 1976), Edward is an Icelandic geographer, graduate of Durham University in England. He is chair of Wageningen University’s research group in cultural geography. Before assuming this post in 2019 he ran the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre (2006-2015) and later worked as a scholar of tourism, professor and head of department at the school of social sciences and humanities at the University of Akureyri, Iceland (2015-2019). Edward works on tourism and spatial theory, earthly attachments, issues of regional development, landscape perceptions, the role of transport in tourism and polar tourism. He is author of over 50 articles in several scholarly journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Tourism Geographies and has published four monographs in both Iceland and internationally and co-edited four books.
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Natalie Vinkeles Melchers-Martinez is an Assistant Professor at the Health & Society Group. Natalie received her PhD in Epidemiology and Mathematical Modelling in the field of Neglected Tropical Diseases from the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam. She has vast experiences in impact evaluations, implementation research, capacity building, mixed-methods research, and disease control interventions in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, Natalie works on the intersection of human-animal-environmental health and applies a One Health approach for the prevention and control of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. She is committed to research on pandemic preparedness and assesses the impact of climate change on these infectious diseases.
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Mellany van Bommel is a junior researcher at the Health & Society chair group. Her research is centred on healthy living environments, the role of citizen participation and citizen initiatives and the interaction between green space and health. For example, she studied sense of place in the context of green citizen initiatives, such as community gardens and food forests. Her broad interest in the relationship between one’s (living) environment and health relates to the various themes that come together in the Health and Environment cluster, such as greening and health, healthy cities and health promoting landscapes.
Sonja Greil‘s background is in Forest and nature conservation (MSc). Intrigued by nature’s more intangible values, she wrote her thesis about deeper values in Dutch forest management. She was very fascinated by the research into the connection that people experience with nature and the physiological and psychological benefits that come from it as well as its implications for pro-environmental behaviour. This connection is what she tries to explore more in her work as a junior researcher at Wageningen Research as she moves between the different institutes as part of a traineeship on integrated area-based approaches
Marthe Derkzen is a researcher and lecturer at the Health & Society chair group. She holds a PhD in environmental geography from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research on green cities, climate adaptation and social justice has been published in books, journals and popular media. She conducts participatory action research on green citizen initiatives and a healthy living environment. Marthe also grows food in her local community garden.
Sjerp de Vries is an environment psychologist who likes to do research on how people are influenced and affected by their physical environment, especially the natural elements in that environment. He does so mainly from an applied perspective. His topics include outdoor recreation and landscape appreciation. However, already for some time his work concentrates on the associations between nearby nature and human health and well-being, the pathways behind these associations, and their implications for spatial planning and design. Method-wise, his expertise is in quantitative research, ranging from experiments and intervention studies to survey and epidemiological research.
Agnès Patuano originally trained as a landscape engineer in France before doing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh (UK) where she investigated landscape preference and fractal patterns. She worked as a research assistant at OPENspace, investigating issues of accessibility and inclusivity of public outdoor spaces, and developed an expertise on topics linking landscape and human health. She also supported the development and delivery of a new MSc program training a generation of future practitioners in the fields of landscape and wellbeing. She is now working on developing a research agenda operationalizing landscape design solutions to support and improve the health of populations.
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